At the moment, on Sundays, we’ve been hearing passages from the beginning of St Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, and this Sunday he tells us that if anyone wants to be regarded as wise in God’s eyes, he or she must “Learn to be a fool.” (1 Cor 3:16-23) You can see and hear me give this Homily on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yuSkz8ZjlU
This reminded me of a saying of Jesus where he tells his disciples ( and thus us) that he is sending us out as “Lambs among wolves,” (Luke 10:1-9) So how are we meant to be a foolish lamb? Does it mean we are just meant to be some kind of idiotic softie?
The answer is definitely no, and that is because of what the lamb we are supposed to be actually signifies. I don’t know if any of you have visited the Catholic Church in Didcot. Unlike most Catholic Churches that have a Crucifix up on the wall behind the Main Altar, the Church in Didcot has a massive image of a Lamb impaled on a Spear and surrounded by a Crown of Thorns. What is surprising is that many Catholics, who are quite happy to view a violent image of Jesus dying on the Cross, do not like this view of a dying Lamb. Yet we all know, and declare at every Mass, that Jesus is not just the man dying on the cross, but also the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.
So when Jesus tells his followers that he’s sending them out “Like lambs among wolves” (Luke 10:1-9) he is surely hinting at the idea that all of us are in some way linked to him, the Sacrificial Lamb of God who has died so that the sins of the world may be wiped away by his blood; and that it is through this sacrifice that we are drawn into union with God and thus to the glory of heaven. And whatever Jesus was, he was certainly not a wimp!
So yes when St Paul tells us to be fools, he surely means that we must be more like Jesus, just as when Jesus tells us to go out like lambs among wolves, he too is telling us to be like him, to take up our cross for him, and that includes the hard task, as we heard in our Gospel (Matt 5:38-48) of loving our enemies. However, what I would like to point out to you is that when you think of all the people gathered at Mass, it is the priest is much likely to be thought of as a fool than rest of the people. The world, (the wolves as Jesus calls them) if they walked in on a Catholic Mass would not see anything particularly unusual about the people, because he or she would quite wrongly think of them as rather like an audience in a theatre, and as such think of them as fairly normal, even if they wouldn’t want to watch their choice of “entertainment” I said that the world would be thinking wrongly, because of course the people at Mass are not an audience, they are the body of Christ offering themselves to Almighty God.
However, when the world (the wolves) looks at the priest at the altar, he or she immediately sees something very different, something that in the world’s eyes is very weird, is in fact something to laugh at. You see, we are used to seeing our priest dressed in the robes of the 1st Century Eastern Mediterranean Roman World. We expect him to make the gestures laid down to link him and us to Jesus; but the world finds this weird, the world finds it laughable that anyone should behave like this. We also know that every priest who stands at the altar offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is being used by God to draw us into a mystical union with God, because every priest represents for us the Lamb of God. Yes, every priest, whatever he is like as an ordinary man, once he stands at the altar becomes for us an Icon of Christ, the Lamb of God.
This is why every priest needs to learn to be thought of as a fool by the world, even if amongst the people of God he is hopefully regarded as someone who is to be looked up to. Indeed, being a fool in the eyes of the world definitely does not mean the priest is meant to be a simpleton. As St Paul said in our Reading last Sunday (1 Cor 2:6-10) We have a wisdom to offer…. not a philosophy of our age, it is true, still less of the masters of our age… It is a wisdom that none of the masters of this age have ever known.” But nonetheless, what a priest does every day at the altar, and what he teaches in his homilies, is simply foolish in the eyes of the world; and even going around the streets wearing the collar can nowadays lead to mockery and laughter and sometimes even scorn. Indeed, even when people are polite one can feel them thinking “He must be a bit of a weirdo.” Lay Catholics rarely face this, except perhaps if they let slip that they’re going to Mass or to Confession; but the Priest (except when on holiday) is permanently on display as a fool; and those words “On display” are also words from St Paul, when he writes on how the apostles (the first Catholic priests) have been put as it were “On display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena” And he goes on. “We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe. (1 Cor 4:9)
Now no one likes to be thought of as a fool, and we priests are no exception. We prefer to be looked up to as good wise people, and when we’re laughed at as fools, it hurts. Then, it is important that we remind ourselves that we are called to tell people that the kingdom of God is very near, whatever they (the wolves) think of us. We priests are called in a very public way to proclaim to the world, whether they accept us or not, that we are all meant to be fools for Christ, to love our enemies however foolish that may sound; and we are all called be like Jesus, the Lamb of God who, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us (12:1-4) “For the sake of the joy which was still in the future … endured the cross, disregarding the shamefulness of it.”
Let us pray that everyone of us, but most especially every priest, may live up to that calling.
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